Easter Eggs in the Old Testament

The scriptures testify about Jesus. That’s what he said (John 5:39, 46; cf Luke 24:27), and his followers took him at his word. They poured over the Old Testament looking for Jesus, and they found him all over the place. Some of those places puzzle us.

When Isaiah describes a servant who is pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities (53:5), we’re within our rights to see Jesus. When David describes someone whose hands and feet are pierced, whose clothes are divided by casting lots (Ps 22:16-18), we’d have to be blind not to see Jesus. But when Hosea says, “Out Egypt I called my son” (11:1), aren’t we taking it completely out of context to say it’s about Jesus like Matthew does (2:14)? The problem is we have a fairly limited sense of the word “prophecy” compared to the apostles.

Theologians and Bible teachers speak of types, patterns, and figures in the OT, but literature gives us a simpler concept: foreshadowing — a literary device where an author gives the reader a hint of what is to come. In modern media, we have developed another useful concept: the Easter egg. 

An Easter egg can be many things — a cameo, a joke, a shout out to another movie, or a hint of what is to come. One famous example of the latter is in The Godfather, where something orange in a scene is a sign of impending death. Another would be the appearances of Captain America’s shield in the Iron Man movies. Sometimes these things are fairly obvious, but usually they are very subtle blink-and-you-miss-it moments that require repeated viewings.

In the Old Testament, these subtle references are everywhere. And like all foreshadowing, you can’t really see them until you’ve read to the end of the story. On the other side of Christ’s death and resurrection, the apostles saw this foreshadowing all throughout the Hebrew scriptures, and so do we. Some things are more obvious than others, and sometimes people get a little too enthusiastic, but we should embrace the idea that the scriptures testify about him.

Is Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac foreshadowing Christ? Pretty much everyone agrees it is. Is Joseph’s betrayal by his brothers? Probably not. The bronze snake? Absolutely. Is Jonah’s adventure with the fish? Christ pointed to it, so yeah. Elisha feeding the hundred? Hmm. Maybe. Who knows?

Is Micah’s prediction that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem? No, that’s as clear a prophecy as you’re going to find, not foreshadowing. What about Jeremiah’s prophecy about “Rachel weeping for her children” (31:15, cf Matt 2:17-18)? The apostle clearly thought it was one of those.

All of this is to say, one, don’t be afraid to see Christ in the Old Testament. He is all over the place, as we would expect if the law and the prophets really do testify about him (Luke 24:44).

And second, those who want to point to a place where the apostles have seen Jesus and claim they’re out of bounds really don’t have a leg to stand on. They’re using a particularly modern sense of the word “prophecy”. We should not allow such chronological snobbery to affect how we view the scriptures.


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